Friday, September 13, 2013

Sharp Edges by S.A Partridge

About the Book

Six friends attend a music festival in the Cederberg. Only five come back. For her seventeenth birthday Demi Crowley invites her five closest friends to join her at a music festival for a party to end all parties. But what was supposed to be the night of their lives soon becomes a nightmare none of them will ever forget.

Sharp Edges is a topsy-turvy tale of love, loss and friendship that will stay with you long after the final page has been turned, and leaves you questioning what you really know about your friends.

Sharp Edges is S.A. Partridge’s fourth novel for young adults.

Review

I became a S.A Partridge fan back in the day when The Goblet Club took local YA fiction by storm, award-winning and thrilling, what more could you want.

Following the lives of five friends, each grieving, in their own way, for the death of a friend. However, this is S.A Partridge, it is never that simple. Each point of view takes the reader through a series of events, one slightly different from the other, all with the same result. Six friends head off to a music festival to celebrate the golden girl's, Demi, birthday. However, only five of them return.

This isn't a simple whodunit quip to add to the crime pile, nor is it the-sickly-sweet YA that seems to be flooding the market (forgive me, but its true). Partridge draws a map of an adolescent need for freedom, rebellion (even if in small and not so dramatic doses), jealousy, love triangle, and a muchly needed in a YA genre gay quiver relationship. Oh, how good this book is.

S.A Partridge is the rabbit you follow down the hole, the boy under the stairs, the race car driving frog, a hidden garden and the sliver of light behind the cupboard.

S.A Partridge lives in Cape Town, South Africa and is the author of the award-winning book, The Goblet Club – a novel about a young man’s frightening experience in the world’s worst boarding school. The novel won the SABC/You Magazine I am a writer Competition in 2007, as well as the MER Prize for Best Youth Novel at the Mnet Via Afrika Awards in 2008. The novel was adapted into a school play entitled G.I.F.

Her second novel, Fuse, deals with the sensitive subjects of school killings, bullying and runaways, and is set on the streets of Cape Town and Pretoria. It was published in 2009 by Human and Rousseau and was shortlisted for the Percy Fitzpatrick Prize for youth literature in 2010. The novel was also chosen as Ibby South Africa’s English nomination for the Ibby International Honour Roll and will be showcased at the Ibby World Congress in 2012.

Her third novel Dark Poppy’s Demise was published in 2011.

She was named one of the Mail & Guardian’s 200 Young South Africans for 2011.